On October 15 2010 06:38 DragonDefonce wrote: ... I mean it can't even beat a queen 1 on 1 anymore. What kind of joke is that?
How is that a joke? Toss can 1-base wall (preventing scouting) and rush voids pretty damn quickly. Zerg has no tier 1 AA other than Queens and spore crawlers, and both just give voids two more things to charge on.
As for those people saying that it is now useless against BCs, Ultras, etc. are you even considering the fact that it does DOUBLE damage to those units while charging to it's second level?
It is a joke because now you need 2 voidrays to do any harassment against zerg. And queen is really good. Try getting more than 1. And if you can't tell that I am doing voidrays by scouting/looking at my forces, you really need to play more to develop a game sense.
Also, 18 damage every 0.6 seconds to units that have over 500 hp, after spending forever charging, when its so easy to to picked off and so costly to make isn't exactly good.
If they were going to nerf them this hard, perhaps a very small speed upgrade should ensue, to make them easier to micro to balance out the low(er) dps.
On October 15 2010 07:17 Zecias wrote: u guys clearly have no idea how to use voids rays.... this is how u do it, u make a small group of 3-6 voids, and when there is a major battle, send yur voids to their base to completely annihilate it. against zerg, u can have voids charge up on ultras or broodlords and they will become cost effective.
Well now you can't even do that because the charged damage is so crappy.
On October 15 2010 07:17 Zecias wrote: u guys clearly have no idea how to use voids rays.... this is how u do it, u make a small group of 3-6 voids, and when there is a major battle, send yur voids to their base to completely annihilate it. against zerg, u can have voids charge up on ultras or broodlords and they will become cost effective.
On October 15 2010 06:38 DragonDefonce wrote: ... I mean it can't even beat a queen 1 on 1 anymore. What kind of joke is that?
How is that a joke? Toss can 1-base wall (preventing scouting) and rush voids pretty damn quickly. Zerg has no tier 1 AA other than Queens and spore crawlers, and both just give voids two more things to charge on.
As for those people saying that it is now useless against BCs, Ultras, etc. are you even considering the fact that it does DOUBLE damage to those units while charging to it's second level?
It is a joke because now you need 2 voidrays to do any harassment against zerg. And queen is really good. Try getting more than 1. And if you can't tell that I am doing voidrays by scouting/looking at my forces, you really need to play more to develop a game sense.
Also, 18 damage every 0.6 seconds to units that have over 500 hp, after spending forever charging, when its so easy to to picked off and so costly to make isn't exactly good.
And what's wrong with that? Two mutas can't do as much damage as one void could, and that requires fast teching to lair. AND waiting for an eternity for a spire to build.
I don't think voids are that difficult to deal with, but if they got lucky and got to your base while you were out of position, you were forced to either wait or go for the base-trade. Unfortunately, void rays win the base trade battle.
Good job, Blizzard. You just removed another high risk/high reward unit from the game. Look, I feel for the people that were getting stomped by void rays in the silver and gold leagues, but was anyone honestly having problems with void rays in diamond? Whenever I built void rays as toss, I felt like I was taking a risk. Unless my opponent was doing something that I knew that I'd autowin against with void rays (like mass marauder terrans that walled off their choke), I never, ever felt like void rays would give me an easy win. In fact, I knew that if I messed up, I'd die, simply because of how expensive void rays are.
I'll play around a bit with the new void ray, but my hunch is that I'm not going to like what I see.
I feel like this change has taken away the "essence" of the void ray.
This. Damage increasing by 60% from 10 to 16 when fully charged -- instead of 400% from 5 to 25 -- is a joke. From a spectator point of view, full charge used to be something to get excited about. It was cool to see people charging on pylons and trying to maintain it by hitting their own units, because it was a HUGE difference. Now, it's just not that serious. Void ray is kind of boring now (regardless of whether or not it is more "balanced").
A unit that sometimes does 5 and sometimes does 25 is called a poorly designed unit. The old VR was just poorly designed. The new one might not be perfect but it is better at least. Balance is generally boring, that's what makes it balanced~.
It's not like it randomly did 5 or 25. It did 25 when it was charged. It takes skill to pre-charge and maintain the charge, and this is what made the void ray a cool unit. At the pro-level it was probably the most micro-intensive unit in the game.
On October 15 2010 07:44 xDaunt wrote: Good job, Blizzard. You just removed another high risk/high reward unit from the game. Look, I feel for the people that were getting stomped by void rays in the silver and gold leagues, but was anyone honestly having problems with void rays in diamond? Whenever I built void rays as toss, I felt like I was taking a risk. Unless my opponent was doing something that I knew that I'd autowin against with void rays (like mass marauder terrans that walled off their choke), I never, ever felt like void rays would give me an easy win. In fact, I knew that if I messed up, I'd die, simply because of how expensive void rays are.
I'll play around a bit with the new void ray, but my hunch is that I'm not going to like what I see.
It was a tricky strategy to pull off, especially against an active scouter, but it paid off pretty much any time you could get the charge up. Proxy pylon became popular to charge up your void rays and roll over the opponent. I guess the strategy is still available, but I haven't tested how well it works with the changes.
They're useless versus terran now. The only good trade you could possibly get is killing 2 vikings with 1 charged void ray. After that, it goes 4 vikings > 2 charged void rays and 6 viking > 3 charged void rays so the mineral and gas trade is not in your favor. Terran now needs 4 vikings and some rines to be safe from charged void rays, leaving the rest of the money free for units that can handle the protoss ground army
Is it me or is Toss the frontrunner for the race with the most useless units?
I have no idea what Toss is suppose to do against bcs (feedback+blinkers is the only thing that comes to mind) and corrupter/broodlords (nothing comes to mind thanks to corrupters having no energy after 1.12). Planetary Fortresses and ultralisks also are nice benefactors of the VR nerf.
Where's the "Void Rays are significantly stronger now" option?
Yeah, on paper, if you built a proxy pylon or something and used it to charge your VR's up or your opponent was just completely unprepared you could get in and do some serious damage. But as soon as he scouted it or fought off the first wave of VR's they were basically useless for the rest of the game; you could build them, but he'd just chase them off before you did any real damage, all while massing up an army that you can't keep up with. So Protoss would build 1-2 void rays and then stop entirely.
Now you can actually do something resembling damage with them using some hit and run tactics. They don't have to be charged up to start hurting. They don't hurt as much fully charged as they used to, sure, but they did such a ridiculous amount of damage before that that isn't really saying much. There are plenty of units that still do less damage than a charged Void Ray.
To put some math behind it, say you sneak in and attack a Barracks or something. It takes 8 seconds "normal" time for a Void Ray to charge. In the old model, you'd do 5 damage per second (the Void Ray has an attack speed of 1) for 8 seconds, and then 25 damage from then on. So if it takes your opponent 12 seconds to move his units over, you did a total of (5x8) + (25x4) = 140 damage.
Under the new model, you do 10 damage for 8 seconds, followed by 16. So again, if it takes 12 seconds for your opponent to move his units over, you do a total of (10x8) + (16x4) = 144 damage. So we can assume that, for any attack that would have been 12 seconds or shorter before (ie: most harass), this was actually a buff.
(Obviously that's if you're playing on normal speed; it's something like 5.5 seconds for it to charge on Faster, putting the crossover point somewhere around 9 seconds in a real game)
I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I've always had with Void Rays was that they're amazing when you can get them to charge, but completely worthless until they do. It's also very tough to get them to actually charge in a lot of situations. So although they're no longer MONSTER DPS once fully charged, they're still pretty good DPS, and they're not worthless until that point.
I dunno, I think they're a lot more actually usable with this change.
i just did some testing. the voids still work very well. they kill equal food of BCs, vikings, corruptors, mutas, hydras, phoenix.
they still do terrible terrible damage, especially against armored. the only difference is charged voids are less auto win than before. i think 99% of the player base wanted this.
the guy above me made a very good point. for harass and general army composition, voids are now better.
On October 15 2010 08:27 devolore wrote: Where's the "Void Rays are significantly stronger now" option?
Yeah, on paper, if you built a proxy pylon or something and used it to charge your VR's up or your opponent was just completely unprepared you could get in and do some serious damage. But as soon as he scouted it or fought off the first wave of VR's they were basically useless for the rest of the game; you could build them, but he'd just chase them off before you did any real damage, all while massing up an army that you can't keep up with. So Protoss would build 1-2 void rays and then stop entirely.
Now you can actually do something resembling damage with them using some hit and run tactics. They don't have to be charged up to start hurting. They don't hurt as much fully charged as they used to, sure, but they did such a ridiculous amount of damage before that that isn't really saying much. There are plenty of units that still do less damage than a charged Void Ray.
To put some math behind it, say you sneak in and attack a Barracks or something. It takes 8 seconds "normal" time for a Void Ray to charge. In the old model, you'd do 5 damage per second (the Void Ray has an attack speed of 1) for 8 seconds, and then 25 damage from then on. So if it takes your opponent 12 seconds to move his units over, you did a total of (5x8) + (25x4) = 140 damage.
Under the new model, you do 10 damage for 8 seconds, followed by 16. So again, if it takes 12 seconds for your opponent to move his units over, you do a total of (10x8) + (16x4) = 144 damage. So we can assume that, for any attack that would have been 12 seconds or shorter before (ie: most harass), this was actually a buff.
(Obviously that's if you're playing on normal speed; it's something like 5.5 seconds for it to charge on Faster, putting the crossover point somewhere around 9 seconds in a real game)
I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I've always had with Void Rays was that they're amazing when you can get them to charge, but completely worthless until they do. It's also very tough to get them to actually charge in a lot of situations. So although they're no longer MONSTER DPS once fully charged, they're still pretty good DPS, and they're not worthless until that point.
I dunno, I think they're a lot more actually usable with this change.
I'm pretty sure VRs only take 6 seconds of game time to charge. You aren't going to convince me the level 2 nerf is offset by +1 (+4 armor) buff in level 1. The only two things it helps kill appreciably better are roaches and marauders, and when do you build a 250/150 air unit to deal with those?
EPT
